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Avnet Virtex-II Pro Development Kit Help

Hello FPGA users,

I am thinking about purchasing the Avnet Virtex-II Pro? Development Kit and would like to find out if anyone is using it or has used it recently. I want to make sure I am not missing anything. It seems like it comes with all the tools, but I find it difficult to get a straight/consistant answer sometimes from Avnet. My confusion lies in the PowerPC tools and startup. I want to make sure that the board and tools (ISE 6.1 Foundation and EDK) are sufficient to get going. I don't need an RTOS for my project so I just want to be able to run my code on the PowerPC either from external RAM or internal BRAM.

Confusion is about the BOOT up process and wether I will have to write alot of system level code. Can someone help me out or point me to a document that might clear up my concerns.

I would love to talk with someone that is currently using this product. Please e-mail me.

Thanks in advance, AJ

Reply to
AJ
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I have an Avnet board. It comes with evaluation versions of EDK and ISE. It comes with a compact flash card containing several demo .bit files. By default it boots into Linux but you can make it boot any one of several sample designs. It had everything I need and ran out of the box in about 10 minutes.

The one bad thing is that all of the documentation comes on CDs. I ended up printing about 500 pages of material so I could leaf to info easily. Also, it would be nice if they posted the documents to the web.

Reply to
Clark Pope

Clark,

Thanks for the information. I recently got the board and have been playing with it. I agree with you that it was easy to get there demos up and running, but I must say I am a litte confused when trying to modify them.

For example I have the 2VP7 Pro chip and was looking at the PLB external memory example. This code/data is in the I&D BRAM and thus has limited space. I would like to modify the code to run in SRAM which starts at 0x00000000 in their example. I was able to find the start address location to modify, but how can you specific the data location in memory? I would like the code to run in IBRAM and the data to reside in SDRAM (or is it possible to use both DBRAM and SDRAM for your data). Also do you or anyone else have any example programs outside the ones they give you to help weed through some of these issues.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

AJ

Reply to
AJ

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